exolon42 writes: This is a mandatory read for every (former or current) Amiga hacker. You have to give it to the Dutch: tulips, cheese, and now a guy named Dennis has recreated the original Amiga chipset in a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA, and recently released all sources under the GPL to boot! This includes the design of a PCB containing the FPGA, the required MC68000 and normal PC-style hardware connectors so you can build your own. A thought-provoking fact is that the Verilog-sources for the recreated chips (Denise, Paula, Agnus etc.) are only around 500-1000 lines each... chips in the eighties didn't contain 1 billion transistors!

Seriously, if this can be done, what would prevent recreating just about any computer from the past?Okay, I recognize that one would need an operational machine to test, and I recognize that the availability of original documentation and/or reverse-engineering notes and documentation is important. (The Tandy CoCo 3, for example, has that strange "GIME" chip that has so far resisted analysis.)

Surely a representative classic Mac could be reconstructed in a form factor similar to the Mini-mig?

Big, fast FPGAs are rather expensive. Otherwise there would be no point in creating ASICs. Buying an old, used but working Amiga on eBay is certainly cheaper than making a Minimig. There's little point (besides the obvious Wow factor and hack value) in these projects. The amount of work is disproportionally bigger than the effect.